Impact case study database

Davey’s research into the hermeneutics of practice contributes to the first text to use hermeneutics as instrumental to the development of care protocols. Through its influence on Professor Nancy Moules (Chair of Child Cancer, University of Calgary), aspects of his hermeneutics of practice have been deployed as part of a new tradition of “qualitative research” in psychology and social science, reaching international practitioner audiences through adoption in nursing curricula and enabling the practical application of hermeneutic structures to meet the demands of nursing practice.

Davey’s involvement with the Calgary unit began in June 2014 with a week of lectures on “The Hermeneutics of Practice” at the invitation of Moules. In associated workshops he responded to patient presentations concerning their lived experience of trauma and acute illness. These corroborated his approach to empathetic transference in crisis situations. Moules’ course text, published a year after Davey’s Calgary presentations, document the impact of Davey’s research on her project [E1].

Moules’ research has multiple aims: to alter attitudes towards nursing practice by presenting it as more than a technology of care; to promote the voice of nursing in humanities’ debates about human well-being in times of crisis; and to remodel the specialist/patient relationship as a mode of dialogical exchange leading to the mutual transformation of both patient and carer.

Distinctively, her research attempts to free nursing from the (ward) desk by opposing its reduction to a technology of patient management and to promote the practice’s practical understanding of suffering within humanities’ debates about mortality. In responding to the “technology of patient management”, Moules makes explicit reference to Davey’s hermeneutic critique of method in her case against positivist reductions of nursing pedagogy; Davey’s dialogical hermeneutics further provides Moules with the reflective tools to articulate the transformative nature of patient-carer dialogue as a way to change the understanding of what it means to care and to be cared for.

Amongst other hermeneuticians, Davey is cited most with 33 references. Moules substantiates Davey’s claim that genuine listening must stay close to the horizon of the patient [ E1, p.94], and that empathetic understanding requires imaginative witnessing [ E1, p.68]. She confirms the therapeutic value of the dialogical with an extensive quotation from Davey 2006 p.xvi [ E1, p.198]. In 2015, a year after Davey’s address, Moules wrote:

Having a glimpse of applied hermeneutics through the eyes of philosophical experts is at the same time gratifying and a stimulating reminder that we are working fresh ground, and it behooves us to keep working to be as exacting as we can about what we do. It is in this spirit that it felt timely to undertake to describe the work-in-progress that is applied hermeneutics in the fleshed out form of a book [i.e., the course text of 2015]. [E2]

Since the publication of her pioneering book, Moules has been awarded five national prizes for nursing excellence. Her work has brought instrumental changes to the way in which clinical guidelines and care standards are communicated empathetically to patients in Canada [ E1, p.185]. The influence of Davey’s work has been acknowledged by Moules who notes:

Professor Davey has contributed to my understanding of hermeneutics and Gadamer’s work. Through me, graduate students across disciplines have been opened to understanding the philosophy that guides our practices and research. [E3]

Davey’s broader influence is also confirmed by an Associate Professor in the Calgary Nursing Unit who comments on the power of hermeneutics in influencing the language of “therapeutic change” and the “significance of dialogue in forming collaborative relationships with patients” describing this as “a deeply hermeneutic way of thinking, that does run counter to conventional approaches of diagnosis and symptom management” [E4]. He further states:

Hermeneutics is well accepted as a basis for research into problems of human relating in nursing, education, and healthcare – not only in our own institution but also translating into success securing Canadian federal research funding … Your emphasis on hermeneutics-as-practice is highly congruent with our needs and approach. [E4]

In separate correspondence, Davey’s perspective is acknowledged more broadly as a way to bring physicians “closer to the flesh and blood realities of patient experiences” and as an ongoing influence [E5].

Moules’ course text has been taken up by 3 UK University and Nursing libraries, 22 in the US, 4 in Switzerland, 3 in Australia, 8 in Canada as well as teaching institutes in Denmark, France, New Zealand, Qatar, Sweden and South Africa [E6]. As a result of Davey’s engagement with the Calgary Group, his hermeneutics of practice has reached beyond academia and now touches a more universal community of concern:

When we practice hermeneutics as a research tradition… we come to understand… matters of human consequence: living well in conditions where suffering often exists... [this research] touches on human conditions of living: illness, schools, children, health, relationships, suffering, healing and hope. [E1]